UPDATE BELOW An article in the Wall Street Journal reports on a technology it says is getting a lot of attention in China, which it--misleadingly, I believe--refers to as underground coal gasification. That makes it sound as if coal is gasified, as in IGCC, creating a syngas that's burned. But actually the technology seems to more closely resemble oxyfiring, a technology Vattenfall is just now demonstrating for the first time at larger-than-laboratory scale at a plant in East Germany. In the approach described in the Journal, coal is ignited underground and fed a piped-down stream of pure oxygen; …

UPDATE BELOW An article in the Wall Street Journal reports on a technology it says is getting a lot of attention in China, which itâ''misleadingly, I believeâ''refers to as underground coal gasification. That makes it sound as if coal is gasified, as in IGCC, creating a syngas thatâ''s burned. But actually the technology seems to more closely resemble oxyfiring, a technology Vattenfall is just now demonstrating for the first time at larger-than-laboratory scale at a plant in East Germany. In the approach described in the Journal, coal is ignited underground and fed a piped-down stream of pure oxygen; …